Looking for Betty MacDonald: The Egg, the Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I

by Paula Becker

  Less than six months after Mary’s birth, Darsie was prospecting in Utah and Nevada, although Butte was still home. Having given up their first house, the family briefly rented a shingled cottage on West Copper Street, nudging the foothills of Big Butte, the weathered outcrop from which the town took its name.

  Darsie operated a copper mine in Ely, Nevada, helping to form first the Western Development Company and then the Butte & Ely Company. Sydney, Gammy, and baby Mary joined Darsie there, living for a few weeks on the Agee Ranch atop Spruce Mountain in Elko County, Nevada, “in a very small shack but [with] an air of happiness and good tolerance of the frontier conditions on the part of all concerned,” according to Darsie’s mining partner, who was also staying there.15 By early 1907, the Bards had rented a house in the Mapleton Hill neighborhood of Boulder, Colorado.16 Mary was two, and Sydney was pregnant again.

  Boulder prided itself on being a healthful, civilized, scholarly community. It was home to the University of Colorado and to a lively and extensive Chautauqua Assembly—a mass cultural movement whose proponents believed in self-improvement through education.17 Ringed by mining towns and camps producing gold, silver, tungsten, and coal, Boulder dedicated itself to higher culture. Sydney and Gammy spent time with Gammy’s three sisters, who had settled there. Sydney joined the Friday Musical Club, which gave monthly afternoon recitals.

  On March 26, 1907, Anne Elizabeth Campbell Bard was born. The family called her Betsy, a nickname she would use throughout her childhood. Darsie, as usual, was away on a mining trip. Betty’s account of her own birth has Gammy dashing, scatterbrained and panicky, to summon a veterinarian neighbor to help. Sydney sent the vet home, cut and tied the umbilical cord herself, and named her newborn daughter in Gammy’s honor.18

  Betsy was born into the inadvertent matriarchy created by her father’s nearly constant absence. At its head was the grandmother whose name she shared. Despite Gammy’s belle-like youth and delicate features, her central attribute was the core strength that fueled her steely perseverance. Then came Sydney, who had chosen adventure over security and would continue to do so, compelled first by her husband and later by the dreams, whims, needs, and demands of her children. And, most important, there was Betsy’s big sister, Mary.

  With the dogged determination and born leadership of the classic eldest child, Mary Bard would set the path for Betsy throughout her life. This sister was a force of nature, at least to her siblings. When she made a plan (and Mary always had a plan), resisting it was nearly impossible. Veering away from her sister’s plan was a skill Betsy eventually learned but seldom practiced. Whether traveling in Mary’s protective wake or pushed ahead by one of Mary’s stubborn schemes, Betsy’s dance with this sometimes maddening but intensely beloved sister would be her most defining relationship.

  The Reverend Eleazer Sibbald baptized Betsy at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder on May 12, 1907.19 The date of the baptism matters, because later in her life, for reasons unclear, Betty MacDonald shaved a year off of her age. By the time she became famous, her birth year was recorded as 1908, but this was physically impossible: by March 26, 1908, Sydney was pregnant with her third child. Boulder County did not register births in 1907, but the baptismal record tells the tale.20

  Darsie was on the move constantly, with and without his family. On April 14, 1907, the Anaconda Standard reported, “Darcy [sic] Campbell Bard is in the city from Nevada and will leave in a few days for Arizona.” His daughter Betsy was just a few weeks old—he was likely in Nevada when she was born—and he had almost certainly not yet seen her. After the Arizona trip, he made it back to Boulder in time for Betsy’s christening but departed again almost immediately. By June, Darsie was in Missoula, Montana, on business.

  “When I was a few months old,” Betty wrote, “Mother received the following wire from Daddy: ‘Leaving for Mexico City for two years Thursday—be ready if you want to come along.’ This was Monday. Mother wired: ‘Will be ready’ and she was.”21 In the event, the Bards remained in Mexico less than one year.

  The Bards’ next home was in Placerville, Idaho. Of all the places the Bards lived for any length of time, Placerville was the most remote. They must have understood that it was a necessary stop on Darsie’s climb up the business ladder, a place for him to gain managerial experience.

  In Betsy’s day, mule trains packed supplies from Boise to Placerville, picking their way through Ponderosa pines and fir trees across the weathered hills that surround the town. The dirt was flecked with bits of gold and mica. Founded in 1863 during the Boise Basin gold rush, Placerville was home to some five thousand people in its early days. Fewer than two hundred remained during the Bards’ two years there. “The snow was fifteen feet deep on the level in winter and mother bought a year’s supply of food at a time. Our closest neighbor was a kind woman who had been a very successful prostitute in Alaska and wore a chain of large gold nuggets which reached below her knees. She was very fond of me,” Betty wrote.22

  In Placerville, Sydney had limited choices in forming friendships. A genial former prostitute must have had interesting stories to share over the tea table, at least. Unlike her own mother, who cared about social niceties, Sydney seems to have taken in stride the less controllable aspects of her life with Darsie, such as whose company she might keep. Spending their early years amid a panoply of multifaceted, colorful adults who’d had outrageous adventures and spun them into stories was perhaps the germ of the Bards’ fascination with unusual characters.

  Darsie had come to Placerville to supervise his first placer mining project.23 Sydney—pregnant again—managed the snow, the tiny house, the relative isolation, and her two small daughters with Gammy’s help. Sidney Cleveland Bard—always called Cleve—was born in Placerville on November 29, 1908, and the 1910 federal census records the family as still living there, on Star Ranch Road.24

  Betsy was about three and a half years old when her family left Placerville. In June 1910, Darsie was elected to fill the chair of mineralogy and geology at the Montana School of Mines back in Butte. Mary was nearing school age, and it was time for a more stable living situation.

  The Montana School of Mines was founded in 1900 to train geological, metallurgical, and mining engineers. The location, an area rich in mineral resources and honeycombed with mines, allowed students to move directly from books to picks and shovels. The School of Mines anchored Butte’s Westside neighborhood, which was populated mainly by the town’s wealthier citizens. Irrespective of their financial status, however, no one in Butte lived isolated from the mining industry. During his years as a professor, Darsie also continued to work as a consulting mining engineer. This work brought in extra income and allowed him to build both a reputation and a stable of clients.

  Before returning to Butte, Sydney took her children back East, to her maternal grandparents’ home in Auburn, New York, to meet her family. It was apparently her first trip home since her elopement.25 Sydney’s mother insisted that the Bard children call her Deargrandmother, and she attempted to refine their manners. “She tried hard,” Betty recalled, “to scrape the West off these little nuggets.”26

  On their return to Butte, the family settled into a modest gabled clapboard house at 1039 West Granite Street, on a corner three blocks from the School of Mines. The new house sat high above the street. A tiny turret rose from the center of its shingled roof, resembling an upside-down ice cream cone. The house was two blocks south of the Butte, Anaconda & Pacific mining railroad, which carried ore from Butte mines to the smelter in Anaconda. The rattling ore cars screeching over constantly busy rails and the rumble of dynamite blasting far below the town provided background accompaniment to all neighborhood activities. Darsie crossed the railroad tracks on his way to and from the School of Mines each day. The Bard children could watch from their front porch as the Butte Electric Railway’s yellow streetcar clacked slowly past their house and turned south onto Emmet Avenue toward the central business district, called Uptown.
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br />   By the time the family returned to Butte, the nation’s appetite for electricity had surged. Generating and transmitting electric power required copper wire as a conductor, and America depended on the Butte mines for this crucial material. Mining copper necessitated a city under the city: an ever-expanding maze of shafts and tunnels, teeming with constant activity, backfilled as their ore was exhausted. Below all of the ordinary life on Butte’s surface teemed this mining hive. Except during strikes, the mines operated ceaselessly. Against this backdrop, Betsy and her siblings grew.

  Headframes (also called gallus or gallows frames) resembling giant oil derricks dominated every view in Butte. Essentially huge elevators, they moved men, equipment, and supplies into and out of the sweltering mines. They also transported the mules that pulled the ore cars in the tunnels, lowering the animals underground in special trusses. Headframes were high-tech wonders in their day, their construction akin to building skyscrapers. The headframe of the Anselmo mine loomed two blocks northeast of the Bards’ house. The Orphan Girl mine headframe stood half a mile west, beyond the School of Mines. Big Butte hovered protectively nearby, marked proprietarily with whitewashed rocks forming a letter M, for the Montana School of Mines.

  Although the Bards were now settled, Darsie was still gone for extended periods, hired by private clients or leading school trips. “Points of geological interest are not always the most accessible,” stated the Montana School of Mines 1912 senior class book: visiting them sometimes required a journey of weeks or months. Darsie led groups of students on horseback to Bridger Canyon in Utah or Yellowstone in Wyoming for field geology classes, trailed by a horse-drawn chuck wagon.

  Sometimes Sydney accompanied Darsie on these trips, and sometimes the whole family went along, camping throughout the Western states. One family member recalled hearing that to keep her small children from wandering into danger while she attended to camp duties, Sydney would tie a rope around each child’s waist and attach the other end to a stake driven into the ground. The children had food and water and were close enough to one another to play, but their tethers kept them from straying.

  Sylvia Remsen Bard, Sydney’s fourth child, was born on December 31, 1912.27 Her life was short: on May 18, 1913, a dismal day of drizzling rain mixed with snow, Sylvia died of pertussis, or whooping cough. Thanks to a vaccine developed in the 1950s, most parents today are unfamiliar with the desperate sound from which the disease takes its common name. Patients with pertussis cough and cough and cough, then suck in a breath with a loud whoop, then cough again. To hear a baby cough so convulsively is terrifying, as is the fact that the whoop confers the desperate hunger for air. Pertussis is one of the most contagious human diseases, and it is most dangerous for babies and children under the age of five. Their small windpipes are more easily obstructed by mucus, and the prolonged struggle for breath quickly weakens the young, especially babies, and deprives them of the strength to take in nourishment.

  Sylvia Bard was one of eleven children under five (and one of seven infants) to die of pertussis in Butte in 1913. Her death certificate—signed by Dr. Thomas Moore, who had delivered Sylvia at home just four and a half months earlier—states that the onset of the disease occurred one month and thirteen days before death. This annotation speaks of six weeks of struggle—struggle to nurse her, struggle to keep her alive.

  It is difficult to know how this sister’s death affected Betsy, who was six when Sylvia died, although the Bard home must have been saturated by grief. It was the first great loss Sydney and Darsie had faced together.28 Betty MacDonald never mentioned Sylvia in her books.29

  The Reverend Blackiston (who had baptized Cleve, then three years old, on the family’s return to Butte, but not yet Sylvia) officiated at a brief private funeral held at the house.30 Sylvia’s tiny coffin was buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery on Butte’s southern edge. If there was a grave marker, it did not endure, leaving only a slight indentation in the sparsely covered ground. As the seasons passed, all traces of Sylvia Bard’s brief existence dissolved into Butte’s coppery, implacable soil.31

  One reason the family had settled in Butte was so that the children could be educated. Mary attended McKinley School, a two-story redbrick building two blocks from the Bards’ house.32 First Betsy and then Cleve joined her there, climbing the school’s wide interior steps, their hands sliding over the thick brass rail. During Butte’s icy winters—the town averages 223 days a year of below-freezing temperatures—the children coasted down Montana Street on their sleds after school, and in the evenings, Darsie took his bundled brood bobsledding.

  The bitterly cold mornings, Betty remembered, did not deter her father’s determination to test and toughen his children physically. Intent on fostering vigor and good health, he insisted they start the day by running around the block. Gammy “would stand by the door waving her ‘apern’ and wailing, ‘Darsie Bard, how can you drive those poor little cheeldrun out into this bitter cold?’ We’d hang around the steps blowing our hot breaths into the freezing air and watching them smoke and hoping that Gammy would soften Daddy, but he only laughed at Gammy and shut the door firmly and finally.”33

  Darsie set high standards for his children, provided structure in their lives, and, on occasions, meted out punishment, encouraging Betsy, Mary, and Cleve to learn self-discipline. We have only Betty’s reports on which to rely, but these paint a consistent picture: Darsie was a kind and traditional father, a man who enacted this role not just by providing for his family’s financial needs but also by making a secure home for them with Sydney. Darsie seems to have accepted high spirits in his children, but he expected them to obey him, believing that under his moral and intellectual guidance, they would grow strong.

  Despite their parents’ influence, Mary was the dominant force in Betsy’s life from early childhood. Betty’s books describe a big sister who is always in complete control, a geyser of plans and ideas into which she drags, pushes, or cajoles her sidekick, Betsy. The Mary of these stories bubbles with enthusiasm and self-confidence.

  Like many strong-willed children, Mary possessed qualities that were considered faults in childhood and virtues in adulthood. In the retelling, though, playing Trilby to Mary’s Svengali often brought Betsy to the edge of peril—once nearly plunging her into an abandoned mine shaft and another time accidentally impaling her small foot on the tines of a rake.

  Although their father warned them of the dangers, cautioning them to watch for abandoned mine shafts and forbidding them from playing on flumes, Mary, Betsy, and Cleve were Butte children, and the mines were part of their childhood play. The cultural anthropologist Janet L. Finn describes life for children in Butte: “Year-round, Butte children honed their risk-taking skills in and around the workings of the mines, incorporating the gallows frames, slag heaps, settling ponds, and train tracks into their social worlds. In contrast to expert calls for safe, designated sites for child’s play, Butte youngsters preferred the allure of the mine yard. They built forts from pilfered mine materials, organized potato roasts behind slag heaps, and dangled from ropes suspended from ore train trestles.”34 This sort of unsupervised, daring play encouraged the Bard children’s imaginations to flourish.

  This risky behavior among children took place against the equally dangerous backdrop of adult existence. Violence was a fact of life in Butte, especially during 1914, when conflict between the conservative Butte Miners’ Union and the more progressive or radical Butte Mine Workers’ Union resulted in the dynamiting of the Butte Miners’ Union Hall, less than a mile from the Bards’ house. Two National Guard battalions were deployed to Butte, and Silver Bow County was briefly placed under martial law. Newspaper stories claimed that 1,500 members of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World, called Wobblies) were en route to terrorize Butte citizens. Although this rumor was false, it increased the residents’ fears.

  Work stoppages in the mines brought violent demonstrations, and this violence sometimes extended beyond the mines. Butte history
includes scenarios in which angry strikers lashed out against mine company officials’ families: wives and children had to flee as their homes were set ablaze, and grocers showed their support for striking miners by refusing to trade with these families. Darsie was much more closely allied with the mine managers than with the workers, and although there is no evidence that the Bards were ever overtly threatened, they held a somewhat ambiguous position in Butte’s strata of alliances.

  On January 16, 1915, Sydney gave birth to a daughter, Dorothea Darsie Bard, called Dede. In her books, Betty described this sister as differing both in appearance and temperament from the rest of the Bard siblings. Family lore recorded Darsie Bard’s special closeness with Dede, whose birth less than two years after Sylvia’s death may have been a kind of balm.

  The unpretentious Bard house must have felt increasingly cramped: three growing children; baby Dede; Darsie, Sydney, and Gammy; and always at least one live-in hired girl. Life for the Bards was also difficult in other ways. The winter of 1915–16 was brutally cold. Betsy fell ill with scarlet fever. Mary and Cleve were sent to stay with friends to spare them from exposure to the disease.

  World War I further increased the worldwide demand for copper. By 1916, there were some 14,500 miners working in rotating shifts in Butte, descending with picks and dinner buckets and ascending eight hours later, filthy, tired, and hungry for the open air—even the sulfur-laden air of Butte. The city, already rough, was getting rougher. Establishments catering to single men—saloons, boardinghouses, brothels—boomed. But many other miners were married and had families, which meant more children elbowing each other in the shared desks at McKinley School, where Mary, Betsy, and Cleve stair-stepped their way through the grades.

  The punishing weather, the overcrowded conditions, and Butte’s inherent danger probably influenced Darsie and Sydney to begin planning their next move, considering life in a warmer, calmer place. Although Sydney loved the West and Westerners, she and Darsie aimed to raise children who were not just resilient but also refined. The constant struggle to protect her children’s manners, language, and social skills must have been exhausting. Betty wrote that her mother dosed the children with bitter cascara as punishment when they swore and that they wondered why the family’s hired girls, who swore constantly, were not similarly dosed.